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"The Earth was broken. Too much taking for too damn long, so she finally broke. But she went out like a wild horse, bucking off as much as she could before lying down."

Cheri Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

One thing I was really upset about in The Marrow Thieves was the blatant fatphobia. There's only one fat character. His name is slobber. He eats a lot. He has no other definable traits. The author is skinny. Really sucks going into a story about a marginalized group that perpetuates awful stereotypes of another.

SPOILERS FOR THE MARROW THIEVES

RIRI'S FUCKING DEAD WTF

It was so left field, I got teary eyed.

I SWEAR IF MIIG DIES I'M THROWING MY DAMN BOOK

I think this was the first time in a damn while I actually had to put a book down and have a break from reading

I read the tws, I knew this scene would be here, but fucking hell

currently running to my cat video compilations to fix this, the book is "The Marrow Thieves" By Cherie Dimaline, I'll do a full book review once im done reading it

She was wearing a new pair of bright pink rubber boots. She'd found them under the bed in her room the first morning. "Look! They're made outta candy," she'd said, then licked the shiny surface of one boot and cringed. "Not candy." RiRi had never had candy, but she'd seen pictures and heard stories about it. So every time something was shiny or bright -- and these boots were both -- she assumed they were candy. It was a constant disappointing hunt for her.

The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline

what i love love love about the marrow thieves is how gentle the characters are with each other. or maybe how the narration is so accepting of them. or maybe both. i fully expected, the entire time, that miig would use shame as a motivator, that there would be an idea of them not being 'strong enough' and having to 'toughen up' and that just didn't happen. even when french killed that man there was just. understanding. grief and trauma responses were described but not judged.

isaac and miigwans <3333

Doctor Julia Ogden is from the CBC tv show Murdoch Mysteries. She is is an accomplished pathologist, psychiatrist, and a practicing surgeon who solves murder mysteries in Victorian Toronto

Frenchie is the main character of the novel The Marrow Thieves, written by Cherie Dimaline:

Just when you think you have nothing left to lose, they come for your dreams.

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden - but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves

Review of the Marrow Thieves.

If you want to read a dystopian story about the after effects of climate change and how Native people try to survive it. Give this book a read. It’s written by Cherie Dimaline who is a Métis (tribe) author.

This story also has a lot of dark things going on in it. Like Native people being harvested like cattle. Or how the world tore itself apart after Climate Change. It focuses on North America mainly Canada.

This story also has happy or pleasant undertones to. Like how the Native elders share the culture with the younger generation. Or how they interact while on the run.

Quote of the Day - November 6, 2022

Quote of the Day – November 6, 2022

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"Sometimes, you have to not bring things into the open, put them aside so that people have the hope to put one foot in front of the other."

Cheri Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

Review: The Marrow Thieves

Synopsis:

In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America's Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the "recruiters" who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing "factories."

Plot:

Francis (Frenchie) and his brother Mitch were on the run. They were hiding from the Recruiters, whose job was to hunt down Indigenous peoples and take them to school, where they would do operations to drain their dreams from their bone marrow. These schools were based on Canada's Residential Schools, an old theory to assimilate the Indigenous peoples of “Canada”.  With the world thrown in chaos and the need for dreams to become the only lifeline, the Indigenous peoples were hunted once again. Mitch, gave himself up to save Frenchie, allowing himself to be taken by the Recruiters leaving Frenchie all alone. When discovered by Ming, Frenchie was taken into a group containing an elder, four boys and two girls. Growing and surviving with them, Frenchie began to claim them as his family, especially Rose, a beautiful Metis girl who stole Frenchie's heart the day she arrived. With the goal of survival, our family moves north, constantly on the run from Recruiters and trying to stay alive. Frenchie and his family must endure as their peoples have done for centuries with the threats of discovery, capture, and death at every corner. They survived accumulation once before; they will survive again, keeping their dreams and stories intact.  

 Thoughts:

Cherie Dimaline wrote this genuinely heartbreaking story about a found family in a dystopian world. Winner of countless literary awards, Dimaline's story has a lot of heart and culture interwoven throughout its plot of surviving an apocalyptic world. The story is told from the first-person point of view of seventeen-year-old Frenchie, who saw his father go off to fight the Recruiters, and his older brother taken away to protect him. Frenchie has a lot of anger towards his people's situation and for all Indigenous peoples of "Canada" for once again being hunted. Dimaline really makes you feel Frenchie's anger and sadness throughout the novel, especially after hearing his fellow family member's "coming-to" story. Dimaline also adds in the story told by Ming as a type of Indigenous storytelling of the past, which is how the world got to the state of hunting Indigenous peoples for their bone marrow. There is a lot of pain in this story. Dimaline does not shy away from resilience that Indigenous peoples have shown in real life in this story. No matter what is thrown at them or how hurt they are, Ming tells his family they must continue on and survive as that is what their people do. Dimaline does not hold back, and you are thankful for it. The plot is fast-paced as Dimaline does a fantastic job moving through the present day, history of the world, history of the characters, adding detail when needed, and only when the characters feel like sharing the painful past of themselves. Unfortunately, this book follows the lines of a "camping" novel, where characters are constantly on the move but never end up at their final destination despite constantly on their way there. Some people are annoyed by this concept and think of it more about the journey than the destination, as Dimaline does fill their "camping" time with the meat of the story that makes it worth a read. Overall, this story does a fantastic job of integrating Indigenous culture into a young adult dystopian novel and has the heartfelt message of family and resilience.

Read more reviews: Goodreads

Buy the book: Amazon

When your OC × Cannon becomes OC × Cannon × Cannon

Context: Just finished The Marrow Thieves, and turns out Issac is alive, so now it's Xander/Miig/Issac propaganda :)

It was a great tree house; some lucky kid must have had a contractor for a father. It was easily two storeys up from the unmown lawn and had a gabled roof with real shingles. We'd been here for three days now, skipping school, hiding out. Before he'd left with the Council and we never saw him again, Dad had taught us that the best way to hide is to keep moving, but this spring had been damp; it had rained off and on for over a week, and we couldn't resist the dry comfort of the one-room tree house with built-in benches. Besides, we reasoned, it was up high like a sniper hole so we could see if anyone was coming for us. It probably started with that first pop of air against metallic plastic, no louder than a champagne cork. I imagined the school truancy officers – Recruiters, we called them – coming for us, noses to the wind, sunglasses reflecting the row of houses behind which we were nestled in our wooden dream home. And sure enough, by the time we'd crunched through the first sweet, salty handfuls, they were rounding the house into the backyard.

The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline

I was ten then, and I watched the military shuttling the cleaner citizens to new settlements and gated communities. We hid in a Dumpster we shared with a mute named Freddie when the school staff came for the Indians. Freddie was Malaysian, but he wasn't taking any chances. Freddie's wife had been carried away at the food bank and she was from Taiwan, but no one believed her. There was good money in snitching on Indians, and people would call in if a Swedish girl wore a braid in her hair. That's why we stopped going to the food banks: the volunteers called in Indian sightings and next thing you knew, a wave of white vans screeched up and off you went, kicking and screaming, watching yourself in the mirrored reflection of their sunglasses, throwing boxes of macaroni and cheese and screaming to some god or devil or anything in between. We'd heard too many stories about the death camps, the way we were being murdered real slow. One time, we were half a block away when they showed up. We watched them carry off an old man and his grandson before we remembered to run. I'll never forget the way that man looked when they tossed his grandson in the back of the van like a bag of rice. I watched his soul fold up on itself like a closing door. The light and warmth and humanity clapped shut in his eyes because he couldn't protect the one thing that mattered. There was no coming back from that, even if he did manage to walk away later on, which he wouldn't.

The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline